Master the techniques used by top software engineers to maximize their impact and make a meaningful difference.

What if you could deliver significantly more value than you do today, with fewer hours of work?

How much more could you achieve in your career?

The most effective engineers — the ones who have risen to become distinguished engineers and leaders at their companies — can produce 10 times the impact of other engineers, but they're not working 10 times the hours.

They've internalized a mindset that took me years of trial and error to figure out. I'm going to share that mindset with you and break down the exact steps you can take to shortcut those years. I'll teach you hundreds of actionable techniques and proven habits so you spend less time grinding on tedious tasks and more on what you actually care about.

Show me how

Introducing The Effective Engineer — the only book designed specifically for today's software engineers, based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at top tech companies, and packed with hundreds of actionable habits and techniques to accelerate your career.

Plus, get the extra boost to jumpstart your progress even further with a suite of complementary tools. Amplify your impact with video lessons of advanced tactics normally only taught in private workshops and seminars, a step-by-step companion guide to walk you through how to build a system to increase your impact week-over-week, a tactical toolkit filled with checklists and questions on how to be more effective at the most common engineering activities, and more.

The tested material has been endorsed by engineering leaders at top technology companies:

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”— Raffi Krikorian, Former VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter

“The Effective Engineer stands out to me as one of the few titles written from an engineer’s perspective with enough specific information to help you and your team work better. In particular I enjoyed the section on metrics and how choosing the right ones will give teams the clear direction they need. It’s a worthwhile read.”— Mike Curtis, VP of Engineering at Airbnb

“I hope more people embrace Edmond's philosophy and techniques to make their companies and careers more successful.”— Bret Taylor, CEO of Quip & Former CTO of Facebook

Have you ever poured your heart into a project with the best of intentions, only to discover that it had a much smaller impact than you had hoped?

Maybe no one used what you had built. Maybe the project was canceled before it even launched because it got too complex, ran over-budget, or failed to meet customer requirements. Maybe it was just “de-prioritized,” but you knew deep down that the project was unlikely to be revisited.

When that happens, it's easy to start wondering: “Why did I even bother to do all that hard work?”

The interactions and behaviors that you had so carefully tweaked — did they actually matter? The thousands of lines of code you had written and meticulously tested — was all that effort wasted? The difficult conversations where you asked your manager for more time and the late nights you had pulled to address launch-blocking issues — what had been the point?

You wouldn't have been the only one feeling that way — years ago, I felt that way too.

Hi! I'm Edmond Lau. For the past decade, I've worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, at technology companies including Google, Ooyala, Quora, and Quip.

During that time, I've interviewed 500+ engineering candidates, spoken at companies about building great engineering cultures, and built onboarding and mentoring programs to train dozens of new engineering hires.

You may have seen some of my engineering and career advice featured on:

When I first left Google to work at a startup, I pulled 70-80 hour weeks. I’d start my work day in the office; I’d regularly spend lunch consulting with my team; and then I’d continue to work from home after dinner — or sometimes even stay in the office until midnight. Even when I was away from my computer, I'd still be checking emails from my phone. We were the underdogs, and I thought I needed to work crazy hours for us to succeed.

But a few experiences made me realize that maybe I was missing something critical.

There was the custom analytics module that I spent two weeks building — and that the customer never used. There were the new tools to improve content quality that we spent months tweaking and perfecting before launch — and that never got the user adoption we wanted. There were the weekly traffic spikes — followed by hours spent spinning up and winding down extra servers. There was the time when I was hiking up the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii — and I got a text message saying that the infrastructure generating analytics reports for customers was down, and could I please take a look.

I wanted to have a big impact and help the startup succeed, but I couldn't help but wonder: Was putting in 70- to 80-hour weeks really the best strategy? Could my time have been better spent?

And that's when I had a key insight that completely changed how I approached work:

More effort DOES NOT necessarily mean more impact.

I realized that working hard, even if it's well-intentioned, isn't enough — you not only need to get things done but get the right things done. If your project fails to launch or if you build the wrong thing and few people use it, your impact's limited — no matter how hard you worked on it.

And so I started wondering: What if we could all work smarter?

What if through better tools and workflows, we could develop software more quickly? Then we would have more chances to iterate and get things right.

What if we could get feedback sooner on whether projects would work? Then we could abandon any unpromising efforts early.

Or what if we could make better estimates about how long different tasks would take? Then we could make better choices about what to cut and what to prioritize.

These questions — they don't have to be “what ifs.”

In the past, I would try to brute force my way to a bigger impact through 70- to 80-hour weeks. These days, I can work healthy 40-hour weeks at a startup and still make a larger impact on the team and on our users than I did years ago, all because I'm working smarter and more effectively. And I can have the flexibility to use the remaining 30- to 40- hours however I want: whether it's to hang out with friends, read a book, or do other high-impact work.

You can increase your impact too, regardless of where you work. It turns out that the most effective engineers already have hundreds of mindsets and techniques that they use to build software faster, reduce wasted effort, and consistently deliver meaningful results.

More importantly, the skills are all learnable.

I wanted to show others how to do the same, but I knew that having more people share their experiences would help people learn faster. And so I spent two years seeking an answer to one question:

How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?

I embarked on a quest to find out. I interviewed and had conversations with engineering VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders at top software companies: established, household names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; rapidly growing mid-sized companies like Dropbox, Square, Box, Airbnb, and Etsy; and startups like Reddit, Stripe, Instagram, and Lyft.

I collected stories from leaders all around Silicon Valley, stories about the most valuable insights they've learned and the most common and costly mistakes that they've seen engineers — sometimes themselves — make.

I spent nearly two years compiling and researching this material because I knew that it could be a valuable resource. It certainly would have saved me a lot of time and effort earlier in my career.

By hearing their stories, you can follow what worked and what didn't and avoid falling into the same traps.

Some of the people I've interviewed include:

Mike KriegerCo-founder and CTO of Instagram

Marc HedlundVP of Engineering at Stripe

Tamar BercoviciSenior Engineering Manager at Box

Yishan WongFormer CEO of Reddit & Engineering Director at Facebook

Bobby JohnsonCTO of Interana & Former Director of Engineering at Facebook

Sam SchillaceSenior VP of Engineering at Box & Creator of Google Docs

Nimrod HoofienDirector of Engineering at Facebook & Former SVP of Engineering at Ooyala

Kartik AyyarFormer Studio CTO of Zynga

Dan McKinleyFormer Principal Engineer at Etsy

These are just a small sampling of the hard questions I posed to them:

What engineering qualities correlate with future success?

Out of everything you've done, what has paid off the highest returns?

What separates the most effective engineers you've worked with from everyone else?

What's the most valuable lesson your team has learned in the past year?

What advice do you give to new engineers on your team?

Everyone's story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes.

You'll get to hear all about these stories and subsequent lessons, stories like:

How did Instagram's team of 13 employees, only 5 of whom were engineers, build and support a service that grew to over 40 million users by the time the company was acquired?

How and why did Quora deploy code to production 40 to 50 times per day?

How did the team behind Google Docs become the fastest acquisition to rewrite its software to run on Google's infrastructure?

How does Etsy use continuous experimentation to design features that are guaranteed to increase revenue at launch?

How does Box ensure that teams shipping new features are aware of and address any performance issues prior to launch?

How did Facebook's early infrastructure team operate thousands of database servers with only a single engineer?

How did a single unit test convince a team of 50 at Zynga that they ought to adopt a stronger culture of testing?

How did Dropbox transform its hiring culture and go from barely hiring any new engineers to nearly tripling its team size year-over-year?

What's more, I've distilled their stories into actionable habits and lessons that you can follow step-by-step to make your career and your team more successful.

One very important thing to keep in mind as you're growing your career is this:

The skills used by effective engineers are all learnable.

And I'll teach them to you. With The Effective Engineer, I'll teach you a unifying framework called leverage — the value produced per unit of time invested — that you can use to identify the activities that produce disproportionate results. And I'll share habits, lessons, and stories to help you identify what high-leverage activities to work on so that you can dramatically increase your impact.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the lessons you'll learn. You'll learn how to:

Prioritize the right projects and tasks to increase your impact.

Identify new skills to learn to expand your career opportunities.

Earn more leeway from your peers and managers on projects you work on.

Spend less time maintaining and fixing software and more time building and shipping new products and features.

Gather feedback when you're working on solo projects to ensure that you're on the right track.

Navigate organizational and people-related bottlenecks so that you can get more done faster.

Find the appropriate level of code reviews, testing, abstraction, and technical debt to balance development speed and software quality.

Shorten your debugging workflow to increase your iteration speed.

Use metrics to quantify your impact and consistently make progress.

Onboard new members of your engineering team to scale your impact.

And much more.

Your time is valuable. To make sure that I wouldn't waste your time and to verify that these were the right lessons to learn, I shared my materials with engineering managers to capture any nuances I might have missed and to get their feedback. Here's what they had to say:

“I'm always skeptical of books that profess to teach a meta-skill since they can come off as too theoretical... After reading through The Effective Engineer, I was impressed with both the thoroughness of its coverage but more importantly with the way it tied everything... into a unified whole. I also immediately put into use some of the insights around increasing iteration speed and optimizing for leverage in my day-to-day practices... I'm already planning to tell everyone on my team to read it as soon as it comes out and suggest we give a copy to every new engineer who joins Dropbox.”— Alex Allain, Platform & Libraries Lead at Dropbox

“As engineers, we often focus our efforts on growing our technical skills. But if you want your work to generate impact and offer real-world value, you have to look beyond your technical toolkit. The Effective Engineer walks you through the critical best practices — from goal setting, to prioritization, to making data-driven decisions — that can increase the results of your efforts and the subsequent value of your work.”— Tamar Bercovici, Engineering Director at Box

“The Effective Engineer is a comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity. Almost every engineer starting at Asana makes at least one substantial mistake — like underinvesting in testing or failing to cost their project — that might have been avoided if they internalized what's written in this book. I'm recommending it to the whole Asana engineering org.”— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

You could ignore this opportunity and go back to learning all of these lessons on your own. You could pick through scattered engineering blog posts, make costly mistakes through trial and error, and network with successful engineers to extract their lessons learned. You could try to brute force your way to higher impact like I once did. But your time is limited.

In fact, time is your most limited and critical resource.

And unfortunately, some lessons can take weeks or months of going down the wrong path to learn.

How much would it cost you and your team to lose weeks or months on mistakes that could easily have been avoided had someone told you what to watch out for? It's important to learn from your own mistakes, but it's far better if you can also learn from the mistakes of others.

This is the book that I myself wish had existed years ago, and when I tested it with other engineers, they felt the same way too. This book would've saved them a lot of time:

“A computer science degree teaches you how software works, but doesn't teach you how to work as a software engineer. This book bridges the gap, teaching you the lessons that it normally takes years to master. I wish someone had given it to me as I graduated college. It would have saved me a lot of time.”— Zach Brock, Engineering Manager at Square

“I’m a big believer in learning by just doing and don’t typically buy into self-help style books. However, I worked with Edmond side-by-side in my first job and learned a tremendous amount from him. I was eager to read this book and found lots of new and actionable lessons. Many of the techniques on time management and leverage would’ve saved me countless hours in the past.”— Ilya Sukhar, Co-founder & CEO of Parse (acquired by Facebook)

“Just recently, I had to test that a newly rewritten server was backwards compatible. Before, I might have just manually tested queries on the old and new servers for each new build. Having read Edmond's book and his Tactical Toolkit, I asked myself: How could I do this more efficiently? I decided to teach myself Python so I could programmatically send a slew of queries to both servers and diff the output. This cut each round of testing from hours down to minutes and made it trivial to add test new cases. I learned to focus on how to improve my workflows, and that way of thinking has made Edmond's resources worthwhile reads.”— Chen Xiao, Senior Engineer at Google

Get the mentorship and guidance you need to succeed

When I first joined Quora, some new engineers were still asking questions about core abstractions in their third month. And then, I built out an onboarding program with the team's help and formalized a mentoring program that assigned each new hire a mentor responsible for that person's success.

The result? Our new engineers could ramp up fast enough to push a code commit to production on their first day and often ship a small feature or bug fix in their first week.

Having a more experienced mentor show you a map of what things are worth learning and what mistakes to avoid can significantly accelerate your career. It used to be that only people who had access to a great mentor or manager would reap these benefits — until now.

I've done the legwork of distilling actionable habits and lessons from engineering leaders so you can spend less time thrashing around to figure things out and more time creating meaningful impact.

Getting access to this material is like having a mentor tell you which strategies tend to work well and which ones don't:

“I had the great fortune of working with Edmond when I was fresh out of school... Our work interactions were always peppered with useful tidbits from him about how to think about my work and projects, and how to be more effective as an engineer...— things I didn't know I didn't know, but which tremendously accelerated my learning and career development. I’ve continuously relayed Edmond’s advice to my teammates throughout the years, but I’m glad that I can do so in book form, without the lossiness of my transmission.”— Tracy Chou, Tech Lead and Engineer at Pinterest

“Organizing career growth in terms of 'building leverage' is an incredibly helpful framework and something most engineers will never discover without a kind and knowledgeable mentor, and such mentors are hard to find. This book provides that mentorship. The section on validating ideas with data was especially helpful — getting good at building minimal systems and efficiently collecting data is not an obvious skill to master, but it’s key to effectively building products.”— Phil Crosby, Co-founder of Liftoff & Former Principal Engineer at Ooyala

“I'd always thought that good engineers were born of long, hard experience, so I didn't think a book could teach me how to be more effective. But in fact, Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices. The Effective Engineer makes recommendations that can be readily applied to any engineering team. I would highly recommend it for engineers and their managers. There is a world of difference between a great engineering team and good engineering team, and this book will help you bridge that gap.”— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

Moreover, I know many engineers want to jumpstart their careers even further, so I've actually put together a complementary suite of tools that build upon the book — so you can achieve more dramatic results, faster.

Imagine if you had a mentor who's worked with over 200 engineers and engineering leaders at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, Pinterest, Optimizely, and other top tech companies, and this mentor shared with you the most common and toughest challenges your like-minded peers faced — problems that you likely face as well — along with recommendations and frameworks for dealing with each challenge. How valuable would that be for you?

Since launching the book, I've been doing one-on-one coaching sessions, office hours, workshops, and seminars with over 200 people. And I've culled through over a hundred hours of conversation and research so I could identify advanced decision-making frameworks and strategies that would be most helpful for you. And after watching the Advanced Mastery videos for the book, you'll be able to:

Master how to consistently deliver business value — become the key person your team trusts to ship business-critical initiatives.

Practice a powerful, 3-question framework to prioritize your highest-leverage activities — so that you're creating the biggest impact you can.

Pick the right projects most likely to propel you up the career ladder — including the nuances of how the criteria change as you get more senior.

Decide when to cut your losses short on a project — the right decision-making framework can ensure you're not wasting energy on unpromising tasks and focusing on high-leverage ones.

Work effectively with people who aren't on the same page as you — including the one key question you need to ask use when you're blocked and depending on someone.

Convince a teammate or manager to consider your viewpoint — instead of struggling to get your point across.

Effectively promote best practices and repay technical debt — even when stakeholders might be pushing you to move faster.

Identify the turning point when further work will produce diminishing returns — so that you focus most of your attention on the highest-leverage activities.

Discover the real secret behind long-term career success — many engineers find out too late that technical ability combined with experience won't automatically advance their careers.

And more.

Get ready for some life-changing lessons.

“There are some real technical pain points I face at Pinterest: improving the mobile app speed, reducing UI latency, improving/defining core metrics, detecting memory leaks, etc. The workshop's been very beneficial. It’s like a friend sharing what he has experienced and learned from others. Most importantly, it taught me to pause from my daily work and think about how to work effectively. I try to spend 10 minutes every morning to plan my daily work. That allows me to spend time to prioritize tasks and only work on high leverage tasks.”— Lin Wang, Engineer at Pinterest

“Technical books can become out of date quickly and often just sit on my shelf because they aren't useful in my day-to-day life. However, the insight to focus my efforts on creating leverage changed my life. It cut through the noise on everything I could be doing and gave me a framework to decide how I spend my time… I now keep track of new topics to learn and regularly prioritize them. In the past year I taught myself iOS development, switched to a team where I could do it full time and started speaking at iOS conferences… I would recommend this book to any software engineer I know regardless of their experience level.”— Veronica Ray, Engineer at LinkedIn

Plus, along with the videos, you can also get the Effort to Impact companion guide, a step-by-step guide to help you build a system to increase your leverage week-over-week. And The Tactical Toolkit, a collection of checklists and questions to help you immediately be more effective at common engineering activities.

My Guarantee: Try The Effective Engineer for a Full 30-Days, 100% Risk-Free

Read The Effective Engineer. If you don't find it helpful, I want you to have 100% of your money back. My entire book centers around effectiveness, and the last thing I would want to do is waste your time or your money.

Here's why I'm offering this guarantee.

In the past ten years, I've read hundreds of books on self-help, productivity, behavioral psychology, and business, all so that I could glean some lessons that I could apply to my career. Very few of them were written specifically for software engineers or shared stories from engineering, however, so I ended up having to translate what I read to engineering situations and experiment with the lessons to see what actually applied.

I'm passionate about helping people grow into better engineers. And when I coached and mentored other engineers, I wished that there was a more targeted resource that I could point them to.

That's why I took almost an entire year away from work — and burned through my own savings — to interview some of the best engineering leaders and distill the hundreds of actionable techniques and proven habits you'll find in the book. I've validated the materials with dozens of engineers to make sure they're relevant and actionable. Fresh college graduates. Senior engineers. Tech leads. Managers. VPs. Startup founders.

I could've launched my book sooner, but I didn't want to publish anything until I was certain that it was high-quality. That's why I was able to get such positive feedback from readers.

And that's why I guarantee The Effective Engineer.

Read the book and the companion guides. Watch the Advanced Mastery video lessons. Listen to the interviews. If you feel like your time would've been better spent doing something else, just email me and show me that you're not getting any results with the techniques. I'll refund 100% of your money. I'm extending the guarantee for a full 30 days.

The reason I'm asking you to show me that you've tried out the techniques is because I really do want to help you become a more effective engineer. I definitely don't want your money if you're not satisfied, but I do want you to make an effort.

Which option is right for you?

An online course could easily cost thousands of dollars. And even though I took nearly a year off without pay to build these resources, I'm making these products affordably priced so that the value you'll reap will easily outweigh the costs.

Note: Some companies give employees an allowance for their professional growth, so be sure to check with your manager if you can get reimbursed.

The Master Package

$249

Designed for the most dedicated achievers who want to maximize their impact and excel in their engineering careers. You know that time is your most limited and critical resource. You want to stop wasting it on things that don't matter, focus it on the things that do, and get the guidance you need to bridge that gap.

Buy Today & Get

12 Advanced Mastery video lessons with Edmond. Each lesson has been carefully drawn from one-on-one coaching sessions, office hours, private workshops, and seminars that I've done with over 200 engineers and leaders at Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Palantir, Amazon, and other top companies. The lessons fast-track you through the most common and pressing challenges your like-minded peers have faced day-to-day, and they'll equip you with powerful frameworks and mindsets so you don't have to stumble through the same problems. That means less of your time spent re-inventing the wheel, and more time spent on the unique challenges of your career.

250-page, professionally edited book, packed with stories and lessons. You'll get it in PDF, Kindle (mobi), and ePub formats for your own personal use — all DRM-free. It's been endorsed by engineering leaders at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, Box, Parse, and more. Each chapter ends with a summary of actionable habits that you can immediately apply to accelerate your career.

In-depth podcast interviews with 7 top engineering leaders. They contain over 5 hours of the most insightful conversations I had with leaders at top tech companies, conversations that were hand-selected from my nearly 2 years of research. The book is filled with great stories, but there's still a trove of valuable insights and advice that I wasn't able to fit in. Each interview condenses hard-earned lessons that would take years to stumble upon through trial and error. You'll get interviews with:

Mike Krieger, Co-founder and CTO of Instagram

Nimrod Hoofien, Engineering Director at Facebook

Tamar Bercovici, Engineering Director at Box

Kartik Ayyar, Former Studio CTO of Zynga

Albert Ni, 5th Engineer at Dropbox

Dan McKinley, Engineer at Stripe and Former Principal Engineer at Etsy

Bobby Johnson, CTO of Interana and Former Engineering Director at Facebook

Effort to Impact, a companion guide on how to implement a system to continuously improve your leverage. In this 16-page, step-by-step guide, I break down the exact process you can take to systematically increase your leverage week-over-week. We walk through how to establish quarterly goals, how to prioritize the highest-leverage activities to achieve those goals every week, and how to ensure you're making daily progress.

The tactical toolkit, to significantly increase your leverage in common engineering activities. The detailed questions and checklists in this 15-page toolkit give you the tactics you need to excel at common day-to-day activities you do as an engineer. Amplify your effectiveness when you're designing and building new features, debugging and verifying your code, running and attending meetings, proposing new designs or ideas to your team, or learning and mastering new skills.

BONUS: Exclusive 26-minute video interview with Sam Schillace, the VP of Engineering at Box. Prior to Box, Sam directed all of Google Apps and built the initial version of Google Docs. In this interview, Sam shares the costliest mistake that he's seen engineers make, one that can save you months of time if you avoid it. We talk about non-obvious mindsets that more engineers and engineering leaders ought to know. And we discuss the intricacies of how to use data and metrics effectively to make decisions.

The Pro Package

$99

Designed for engineers looking for an extra boost beyond the book to fast-track their professional growth. Get the resources you need to make your career and your team more successful.

Buy Today & Get

12 Advanced Mastery video lessons with Edmond. Each lesson has been carefully drawn from one-on-one coaching sessions, office hours, private workshops, and seminars that I've done with over 200 engineers and leaders at Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Palantir, Amazon, and other top companies. The lessons fast-track you through the most common and pressing challenges your like-minded peers have faced day-to-day, and they'll equip you with powerful frameworks and mindsets so you don't have to stumble through the same problems. That means less of your time spent re-inventing the wheel, and more time spent on the unique challenges of your career.

250-page, professionally edited book, packed with stories and lessons. You'll get it in PDF, Kindle (mobi), and ePub formats for your own personal use — all DRM-free. It's been endorsed by engineering leaders at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, Box, Parse, and more. Each chapter ends with a summary of actionable habits that you can immediately apply to accelerate your career.

In-depth podcast interviews with 7 top engineering leaders. They contain over 5 hours of the most insightful conversations I had with leaders at top tech companies, conversations that were hand-selected from my nearly 2 years of research. The book is filled with great stories, but there's still a trove of valuable insights and advice that I wasn't able to fit in. Each interview condenses hard-earned lessons that would take years to stumble upon through trial and error. You'll get interviews with:

Mike Krieger, Co-founder and CTO of Instagram

Nimrod Hoofien, Engineering Director at Facebook

Tamar Bercovici, Engineering Director at Box

Kartik Ayyar, Former Studio CTO of Zynga

Albert Ni, 5th Engineer at Dropbox

Dan McKinley, Engineer at Stripe and Former Principal Engineer at Etsy

Bobby Johnson, CTO of Interana and Former Engineering Director at Facebook

Effort to Impact, a companion guide on how to implement a system to continuously improve your leverage. In this 16-page, step-by-step guide, I break down the exact process you can take to systematically increase your leverage week-over-week. We walk through how to establish quarterly goals, how to prioritize the highest-leverage activities to achieve those goals every week, and how to ensure you're making daily progress.

The tactical toolkit, to significantly increase your leverage in common engineering activities. The detailed questions and checklists in this 15-page toolkit give you the tactics you need to excel at common day-to-day activities you do as an engineer. Amplify your effectiveness when you're designing and building new features, debugging and verifying your code, running and attending meetings, proposing new designs or ideas to your team, or learning and mastering new skills.

BONUS: Exclusive 26-minute video interview with Sam Schillace, the VP of Engineering at Box. Prior to Box, Sam directed all of Google Apps and built the initial version of Google Docs. In this interview, Sam shares the costliest mistake that he's seen engineers make, one that can save you months of time if you avoid it. We talk about non-obvious mindsets that more engineers and engineering leaders ought to know. And we discuss the intricacies of how to use data and metrics effectively to make decisions.

Just the Book

$39

Designed for engineers on a budget who still understand the value of having a guide on the best areas to spend their time.

You'll get digital versions of the 250-page, professionally edited book, packed with stories and hundreds of strategies and lessons. You'll get it in PDF, Kindle (mobi), and ePub formats for your own personal use — all DRM-free.

It's been endorsed by engineering leaders at Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, Twitter, Box, Parse, and more. The foreword is written by Bret Taylor, CEO of Quip, former CTO of Facebook, and one of the creators of Google Maps. Each chapter ends with a summary of actionable habits that you can immediately apply to accelerate your career.

Have a larger team or interested in booking a Q&A session for your team? Contact support@effectiveengineer.com to arrange a business or enterprise license or a private team session.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will this book help me if I'm a product manager or a designer or someone else who works with software engineers?

Yes. If you work with software engineers — for example, if you're a product manager, a designer, or a less technical manager — the book can be a valuable way to gain insight into engineering mindsets. It'll give you the language you need to communicate how the team can be more effective.

Will the book help me if I'm an engineer who doesn't work in software?

All the stories I've gathered are from software engineers, and I've targeted the book specifically toward a software engineering audience. There is a limited amount of software jargon. That said, if you've enjoyed the writing on my blog and work in another field that doesn't have a similar resource, you could certainly apply the framework of leverage to your own field, and it's likely that you can generalize some of the lessons as well.

Will I get anything out of this book if I've already built up decades of experience?

I've made sure to go in-depth into the tips and habits I provide, so that even if you're already an experienced engineer, there'd still be something for you to learn. Plus, many of the stories you won't find anywhere else.

But don't just take it from me. Here's what one experienced reader had to say about the book:

“I’m very impressed, by both your depth of insight as well as your clear, approachable writing style. I’ve worked for technology businesses for thirty years, and it was 45 years ago that I first keyed boot code into a PDP-8/S.” — P. G.

Will this help me if I work at a startup or mid-sized company?

Absolutely. I've worked at startups for the past 7 years. The smaller the company, the more critical it is to the team's success that everyone's focusing on the highest-leverage activities. Being more effective means that you can work more reasonable hours and avoid burnout.

Will this help me if I'm working a 9-5 job at a more established company?

Yes. I've worked at Google and Microsoft, and I know what it's like to work a big company. I've also tested the material with engineers at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other established tech companies. Getting a promotion and climbing the career ladder require that you produce a meaningful impact on your users, your business, and your team, and this book will help you maximize the impact of your time.

Will there be any code in this book?

No. There are plenty of books that can teach you technical programming skills, but at some point, you'll find that technical proficiency is insufficient for success. The engineers with the strongest technical skills don't always build the best products or the best teams. This book focuses on all the meta-skills and gives you a unifying framework — leverage — that you can use to get your work done.

Is a physical copy of the book available?

Yes. You can get it on Amazon. Amazon keeps 50% of the revenue for paperback sales though, so if you're indifferent between a physical or digital copy, I would appreciate your support in purchasing a digital copy. Proceeds help fund the development and research of future resources for engineers.

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“The Effective Engineer is a seamless blend of insight, personal revelations, and stories drawn from distinguished practitioners. Read this book, and learn from its author and contributing storytellers how to turn effective habits into common practice.— Xiao Yu, Engineer at Tsumobi and Early Engineer at Meraki (acquired by Cisco)

“Despite having over a decade of professional experience, I was humbled to discover how much more effective I could be with some small tweaks. Had I followed Edmond's advice to work on the riskiest part first (the data model) and to ask for frequent feedback when working on a school administration tool I built last year, I would've cut my implementation time by at least 7 weeks. I wish had this book two years ago, and I really wish I had it ten years ago.”— Leo Polovets, Partner at Susa Ventures & 2nd engineering hire at LinkedIn

“The Effective Engineer gave me an opportunity to reflect, and it gave me a framework to think about what kinds of factors make teams successful. The specific recommendations are clear and insightful, but perhaps even more important is Edmond Lau's process. It's easy for engineers to get buried in the daily slog of pushing projects forward. Edmond reminds us that every so often, we need to take a step back to think about what we've done and how we can do better.”— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google